Want to embark on your own Virtue Project? Here is everything you need to start learning how to live the virtuous life compiled in one place.
Theory
You can’t make any progress with building virtue until you know what it is and are convinced that virtue formation is the best investment you can make in yourself.
If you look up the definition of virtue, you will find something like this:
- moral excellence; goodness; righteousness.
- conformity of one’s life and conduct to moral and ethical principles; uprightness; rectitude.
While I think this is an excellent start, it leaves us without any idea how virtue actually functions. C.S Lewis defines virtue formation as the process of training your thoughts and emotions to line up with what is good, right, and true (here is my summary of his writing on virtue). Virtue is like training yourself to think, feel, and react in a morally praiseworthy way to every situation you encounter. Lewis pictured reason as the head, involuntary thoughts and emotions as the belly, and virtue as the chest between the two.
Reason controls the natural appetites through virtuous living. Philosophers and theologians have understood this for centuries and communicated it in a huge variety of ways.
Two Pre-Requisites
Responsibility and Freedom
When I began researching unruly emotions and unconscious or intrusive thoughts, I was frustrated that they seem to be outside of our control. And in one way they are outside of our direct control. But as I did more research, I found out thoughts and emotions are a bit like blood pressure. You cannot directly control your blood pressure, but everything you do can have an influence on whether it goes up or down. If you craft a certain type of lifestyle, you can either become a person with high or low blood pressure.
In the same way, we are not victims of our thoughts and emotions, we have the freedom to influence them over time. With freedom comes responsibility. In short, I realized that I was responsible for my thoughts and emotions, and that I was able to change them.
Self-Awareness
To begin working on something as slippery and difficult to master as virtue requires a working level of self-awareness. That makes learning self-awareness the first step in your journey into the virtuous life. I used meditation and some very intentional journaling to start establishing a basic awareness of what my thoughts and emotions were doing and starting to think about why.
Starting Your Own Virtue Project
While you are establishing a baseline of self-awareness, your next step should be to get as much understanding as you can of what the virtues are and what your particular strengths and weaknesses might be. Having an honest conversation with a spouse, family member, or close friend would be a great place to start. If you have some adversity and problems in your life, examining them closely could give some helpful direction.
Other than that, I highly recommend taking this free character strengths assessment. It comes from the world of positive psychology, so it has its own set of presuppositions and its own language, but I have found it to be extremely helpful for understanding my own character.
Once you understand your own character strengths and challenges, you can come up with a strategy for building some virtue into your life. I found the best method was to identify one or two weaknesses to work on and then leveraging one of your biggest strengths to help you work on them. You can read more about how I analyzed my results here.
For me, I found perseverance and bravery to be two of my lower character traits that I wanted to work on. I am very strong in love of learning and prudence, so I decided to use my love of learning to discover ways to work on my weaknesses, while keeping my prudence in check.
Develop a Strategy
I think this can be a great strategy for anyone. Here it is in list format.
- Pick a weakness to work on
- Pick a strength to leverage in your favor
- Identify an overused character strength to keep in check
Finally, you can’t just work on virtue formation in a vacuum. You need to pick a sphere within which to work on your project. I actually picked several spheres as platforms for building virtue. One was my daily routine, another was my finances, and the third sphere is actually this website. I picked these platforms to serve as measurable feedback mechanisms for determining whether I was actually making progress. The key is having a limited sphere and specific ways to measure your results.
Leave a Reply